Perfect! I hadn't thought about the field name length and forgot about union all. So those are both very helpful. Thank you!

Carole


>You cannot ALTER cursor with long filed name (longer than 10 characters). You can UNION cursors with memo fields if you can use UNION ALL.
>
>>What would prevent me from altering the structure of a readwrite cursor?
>>
>>In two different locations in my application, I am creating a readwrite cursor and then dropping the memo fields because I later want to do a union and you can't union cursors with memo fields.
>>
>>I know several work arounds, but I am puzzled since dropping a field works fine in one instance and is failing in another.
>>
>>So here is some sample code:
>>
>>

>>* mhistory here is the memo field
>>select cfirst, clast, mhistory ;
>> from customer ;
>> where clast = "Brown" ;
>> into cursor cur_selectedcustomers ;
>> readwrite
>>
>>alter table cur_selectedcustomers drop column mhistory
>>

>>
>>The error I am getting is: Invalid operation for the cursor (Error 1115)
>>
>>Which from the VFP help is: An attempt was made to use the PACK command on a cursor.